Field
This disclosure is generally related to distribution of digital content. More specifically, this disclosure is related to a system for interest encryption which facilitates efficient content exchange between a consumer and a producer in a content centric network.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to create a vast amount of digital content. Content centric network (CCN) architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing and processing such digital content. A CCN includes entities, or nodes, such as network clients, forwarders (e.g., routers), and content producers, which communicate with each other by sending interest packets for various content items and receiving content object packets in return. CCN interests and content objects are identified by their unique names, which are typically hierarchically structured variable length identifiers (HSVLI). An HSVLI can include contiguous name components ordered from a most general level to a most specific level.
A client or consumer retrieves content from a CCN by issuing an interest with a unique name to the network. A CCN interest may also carry an optional payload to “push” information to a producer. To protect any sensitive information in the interest, current techniques allow the consumer to either establish a secret key with the producer to encrypt the private data or use the producer's public key to encrypt the private data. In the former case, the consumer and producer must exchange information using a key exchange protocol in establish a shared secret key. In the latter case, the consumer must already possess the producer's public key or perform an information exchange over the network to retrieve the producer's public key. These techniques require more than one round trip time (“RTT”) interest-content exchange or a priori knowledge of a target producer's public key, which can affect the efficiency of content distribution in a CCN.